Open Education Resources (OER) come in many forms. Some are complex and fullblown activities or even courses to use. Others are less ambitious.

Clipart might be one of the less ambitious offerings. Openclipart.org is a source of clipart produced by almost 4000 different creative people. The clipart is designed using Inkscape, the Free Software vector art tool and is submitted to the site with a public domain dedication to remove any sort of restriction for reuse or remixing. There is no requirement to cite the original author, but it is gratifying and just plain nice to see the work reused.

I recently submitted a graphic of a truck carrying “loads of love” which I had initially created to add as a closing to emails to family.

Today, I stumbled across a remix at openclipart.org done by another user: netalloy.

Thanks to all who use a clipart. That’s what it is there for. Have fun. Share your work, too.

As part of my PLN (Personal/Professional Learning Network), I follow several people on Twitter. Sometimes they provide direct insight. Sometimes, too, they provide links. I am grateful for both.

Today Ana Cristina Pratas (@AnaChristinaPrts) gave a link to ClipArt ETC which the tweet identified as “Free Educational Illustrations for Classroom Use”. Her link is to her own ScoopIt account and from there it is a click on the popup title to the original site.

On the ClipArt ETC site, The University of South Florida is offering clipart for “free” educational use. They have terms that limit a person from using the clipart commercially without paying them. They also limit a single student/teacher project from incorporating more than 50 clipart items under their free use terms. That sounds pretty liberal until you examine some of the clipart they are offering.

I’m a former science teacher with an affection for plants/botany, so I picked a random image from their category:
ClipArt ETC – Plants – Cellular Botany – Epidermis

Epidermis – ClipArt ETC

This image is like many I’ve seen. It is a good illustration of a leaf sliced through, as viewed through a microscope. It would make a great handout or presentation slide, maybe talking about chlorophyll and photosynthesis.

You can download in several sizes. Wonderful. Botany unit booklet, here we come.

Back to the licensing. They ask that any use of the image be credited back to them as the source. No problem there. But, I examined the illustration’s meta data that they provide. It turns out that this image is from a botany book published in 1914: Nature and development of plants, by Carlton C. Curtis. That would put the book and its illustrations into the public domain, as far as I can tell.

Now, I don’t have any problem citing the ClipArt ETC site and The University of South Florida. Making sources easier to find by others who read through my classroom projects is a great thing to do.

The problem I have is that OER (Open Educational Resources) have a tough enough time being put together. If I were to put a botany unit together, I might actually wind up using more than 50 of the good illustrations I found at ClipArt ETC. Botany is a pretty broad topic. It bothers me that I’d be in technical violation of the site’s term, in spite of the fact that many clipart documents found there are in surely in the public domain and are legally not subject to terms like the ones on the site. If they have copyright clearance for much of their collection to offer rights-restricted works by their terms, great. That would help teachers and students with their projects. If The University of South Florida is ADDING limitations, then not so good, not good at all.

In your attempts to develop your own OER projects, keep things as truly free as you can. Cite your sources. Give the requested credits, but demand more openness from sources than they currently want to give. Be persistent. The cultural commons doesn’t belong just to someone else. It is also yours.

I’m good at missing important events. It happens every year. This year, it was National Education and Sharing Day. In 2011, the date was April 15. The day commemorates the work of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Maybe I can be forgiven for missing the date. It is celebrated on 11 Nissan according to the Hebrew calendar which doesn’t coincide with the Gregorian calendar we use in secular America. The date is different each year on the calendar I look at every day.

Nevertheless, I’m celebrating. I’ve made a graphic to encourage sharing beyond one day. One day of sharing isn’t enough, you know.

Right click the graphic to save it to your own computer. Modify it as you see fit. That’s part of the deal, too. It is shared with no restrictions.

It is posted at openclipart.org, too. You can find my graphics on the site by searching for “runeman”. Search for graphics by other key words, too. Holiday graphics are always popular. If you are looking for an easy way to do your own graphics, look at Inkscape which generates images that can be easily resized. Modern browsers like Firefox 4 handle the scalable vector graphics (SVG) easily. Openclipart.org is a repository of graphics for all occasions. Anybody can get an account to post graphics. The graphics are usually original, like mine, but may also be reissues from other public domain sources. By being released directly into the public domain, our shared cultural commons grows with every donation made.

Teachers are always on the lookout for good graphics to use in handouts. Public domain images are perfect. They are freely shared, allowing unlimited reuse. Teachers can confidently put the images onto worksheets and Web pages without any concern for infringing copyright.